The Latest Patent for the 'Impossible' EM Drive Has Just Been Made Public - and it’s Wild

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It’s
been a big year for the 'impossible' EM Drive - a new kind of rocket engine
that appears to generate thrust without any kind of exhaust or propellant. Back
in May, NASA researchers reported a successful 10-week trial of their EM Drive
prototype, and inventor Guido Fetta just got approval to test his own version
in space.

Now,
the UK Intellectual Property Office has released the latest patent application
from British EM Drive inventor Roger Shawyer, and he says millions of pounds
rest on the success of design within.

"The
patent process is a very significant process, it's not like an academic peer
review where everyone hides behind an anonymous review, it's all out in the
open, this is a proper, professional way of establishing prior ownership done by professionals in the patent office, and in order to publish my patent application, they had to first carry out a thorough examination of the physics in order to establish that the invention does not contravene the laws of physics." Shawyer told Mary-Ann Russon at the International Business Times.

For
the uninitiated, the EM Drive was first invented by Shawyer back in 1999, and
despite experimental evidence suggesting that such an engine could work, it’s
been courting controversy ever since.

Why?
Well, it just so happens to violate one of the most fundamental laws of physics
we have: Newton's Third Law, which states, "To each action there's an
equal and opposite reaction."

In
its most basic form, the EM Drive uses electromagnetic waves as 'fuel',
creating thrust by bouncing microwave photons back and forth inside a cone-shaped
closed metal cavity. This causes the 'pointy end' of the EM Drive to accelerate
in the opposite direction that the photons are pushing. But
there's the problem - "an equal and opposite reaction" means
something needs to be pushed out the back of propulsion system in order for it
to move forwards, and the EM Drive doesn't have an exhaust.

Newton's
Third Law states that without an exhaust, you can't produce thrust, but
experiments from NASA and a number of other research teams from around the
world have shown that not only can the EM Drive produce thrust - it can
theoretically produce enough to power an entire spacecraft. If
we can power spacecraft with such an engine, it could replace the incredibly
expensive and heavy rocket fuel that’s been a major hurdle in getting us much
of anywhere in the Solar System.

As
Harold (Sonny) White, leader of the research group over at NASA's Eaglework
Laboratories, says, a crewed mission to Mars in an EM Drive-powered spacecraft
could arrive at Mars in a mind-boggling 70 days. That’s less than half the time
NASA has estimated it will take using current technology. Since
Shawyer proposed such a device almost two decades ago, he’s been busy trying to
beat everyone else to the punch, applying for patent after patent with every
tweak he makes.

His
latest patent has just been made public, and describes a new thruster design
that features a single flat superconducting plate on one end, with a uniquely
shaped, non-conducting plate on the other. He
says this is necessary to minimise the internal Doppler shift - a change in
frequency or wavelength of a wave for an observer moving relative to its source
- and also keep manufacturing costs down.

"This
is pretty significant, because it enables you to easily manufacture these things,
and we want to produce thousands of them," he told Russon at the
International Business Times. "The patent makes the construction of a
viable superconducting thruster easier, and it will produce a lot of
thrust."

You
can access the patent here, but here’s a taste of the contents, with a rundown
of just one component - the control circuit:

According
to Russon, Shawyer is working with an unnamed UK aerospace company to develop
his second generation EM Drive, which he says will produce thrust many orders
of magnitude greater than that observed by NASA’s Eagleworks team or any other
laboratory. We’ll
have to wait and see once he gets his invention out of the lab and into space,
like this entrepreneur is planning to do in the coming months.

And
in the meantime, we’ve got a milestone paper coming up, because the American
Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) has finally confirmed that a
paper by the Eagleworks team has been peer-reviewed and accepted for
publication in December.